Tacit knowledge is the detailed knowledge stored in a person's mind. It is a valuable asset in most organizations. Typically, as the size of an organization increases, the value to the organization of the tacit knowledge of its employees increases as well.
Despite its great value, organizations have historically been unable to fully or efficiently utilize the tacit knowledge of their employees. This is due, in part, to the very nature of tacit knowledge being both voluminous and highly differentiated. To date, approaches to utilizing tacit knowledge have involved manual processes, such as the designation and querying of known experts in a particular field, and computer software programs for entering, storing, and accessing tacit knowledge in a database, e.g., a knowledgebase. More recently, attempts to utilize tacit knowledge have included the automated scanning of electronic mail messages between an organizations employees.
Such approaches suffer from a number of deficiencies. For example, it may be unclear that one is even faced with a task or problem that may benefit from the tacit knowledge of another member of the organization. That is, one may not realize that another member of the organization has previously executed the same task or overcome the same problem. Knowledge of such may enable an individual to greatly simplify his/her execution of the task or solving of the problem and may also enable the individual to avoid mistakes made by others.
Even when an individual knows that he or she is faced with a particular problem, he or she may not be able to articulate the problem well enough to determine which members of the organization may have experience with the problem. For example, knowing that a computer program encounters errors when running on a particular network may not enable an individual to determine whether the error is the result of a software flaw, a hardware failure, or a network failure. As a result, it may be unclear whether he/she should seek help from individuals involved with writing the software, those responsible for installation and/or maintenance of the hardware, or a network administrator.
In addition, once an individual having experience with the particular problem is identified, the user may not be able to provide that individual sufficient context to enable the individual to provide guidance and/or a solution. For example, if it is determined that the error above is the result of a software flaw, the user may not be able to articulate to the individual all of the details (e.g., type of error, when error occurs, extent of error, etc.) necessary for that individual to accurately guide the user toward a solution.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.